Category Archives: Astronomy

Universe Today

Gravitational Astronomy? How Detecting Gravitational Waves ... Universe Today Just a couple of weeks ago, astronomers from Caltech announced their third detection of gravitational waves from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave ... and more »

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Gravitational Astronomy? How Detecting Gravitational Waves ... - Universe Today

Selena Screening at the Paramount

7 p.m. June 20. $7-$12. 713 Congress Ave. austintheatre.org.

Celebrate the 20th anniversary screening of the movie Selena, starring Jennifer Lopez. It comes complete with the Paramount Theatres Anything for Selenas happy hour starting at 6 p.m. and featuring music by Selena tribute band Bidi Bidi Banda, Home Slice Pizza, a photo booth, $2 Lone Stars and more. Bustiers are encouraged. Selena is the story of Tejano music sensation Selena Quintanilla, whose life was tragically cut short at the age of 23 when she had just become a rising star with a dynamite stage presence.

Steve Earle at Waterloo Records

5 p.m. June 20. Free. 600 N. Lamar Blvd. waterloorecords.com.

The Texas-born, New York-based troubadour will feature songs from his new album, So You Wannabe an Outlaw, at this solo acoustic in-store performance. Hell be back in a couple of weeks as part of the lineup for Willie Nelsons Fourth of July Picnic, joined at that show by his longtime backing band that includes former Austinites Eleanor Whitmore and Chris Masterson, but these will be your only opportunities to hear Earle play live. Peter Blackstock

7 p.m. June 20. Free. The North Door, 502 Brushy St. northdooraustin.com/queueapp.com/events/32637.

The monthly event highlighting the cosmos over a pint of beer or two will present three exciting talks focusing on dusty star-forming galaxies, nearby galaxies and the disks around young stars, with speakers including Kimberly Sokal, Sinclaire Manning and Sydney Sherman. Hope for good weather: Astronomy on Tap organizers will have telescopes on hand to look for cool objects in the night sky. There will be a segment about astronomy in the news, as well as trivia and new giveaways.

In Good Company Dinner at Alcomar

The final installment in Alcomars dinner series featuring Chefs Alma Alcocer-Thomas and Jeff Martinez favorite local vendors highlights East Austins Boggy Creek Farm. The four-course dinner will feature fresh produce from the farm paired with cocktails and wines. Courses include items like crab-stuffed squashed, roasted heirloom tomato chipotle salsa and avocado pumpkin seed salad. Boggy Creek has become beloved in town for its tasty fruits, vegetables, fresh eggs, local honey and more.

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Selena screening, Astronomy on Tap and more events for Tuesday fun - Austin American-Statesman

If you've ever been curious about NASA or the universe, Wednesday night might be the perfect time to get some answers.

The local Friends of Galileo Astronomy Club is featuring guest speaker Les Hasting, a NASA ambassador, for its upcoming monthly meeting Wednesday night. This free event will take place from 6 to 8 p.m in the basement of the Longview Public Library.

FOG President Chuck Ring said Hasting, a native of Skamania County, will cover a multitude of topics.

"(Hasting) gives a pretty good lecture about what you can see right now and whats going to happen in the near future," Ring said. "He may talk about the solar eclipse. Its just good information."

On Aug. 21, all of North America will be treated to an eclipse of the sun, which NASA describes as "one of natures most awe-inspiring sights. The "path of totality," in which the moon will completely cover the sun, will stretch from Lincoln Beach, Ore., to Charleston, S.C. Observers outside this path will still see apartial solar eclipsewhere the moon covers part of the sun's disk.

In Southwest Washington, about 90 percent of the sun will be eclipsed.

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Astronomy club to host NASA ambassador Wednesday - Longview Daily News

The newest Kepler catalog draws out 219 new planetary candidates and infers that 10 of them may be habitable doubling the number of planetary candidates in the habitable zone of their star. The Kepler catalog now stands at 2,335 confirmed planets and 4,034 strong candidates.

This catalog marks the final results of the first Kepler mission, which stared at the same portion of the sky for three-and-a-half years before a busted reaction wheel forced NASA to pivot the mission to other forms of planet hunting. There were only a small number of newly confirmed planets.

The data of the final catalog also suggests that there is a certain point at which super-Earths become more Neptune like, with a jump in mass as planets accumulate. This is why there seems to be so few planets between three and 10 Earth masses.

The Kepler telescope looked for planetary transits, when a planet passes in front of its star and causes a slight dip in its light. The original mission took a small sample of the sky in the Cygnus constellation to act as a sort of statistical survey. When a signal is sufficiently strong, its considered confirmed. If it cant quite be confirmed, its considered a candidate until further observation can verify a planet there.

You can scroll the list of all discovered exoplanets here.

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Kepler yields a handful of promising planetary candidates - Astronomy Magazine

Chinas Long March 4B rocket lifts off Thursday with the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope. Credit: Xinhua

Chinas first X-ray astronomy satellite launched Thursday on a mission to survey the Milky Way galaxy for black holes and pulsars, the remnants left behind after a star burns up its nuclear fuel.

The Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope will also detect gamma-ray bursts, the most violent explosions in the universe, and try to help astronomers link the outbursts with gravitational waves, unseen ripples through the cosmos generated by cataclysmic events like supernova explosions and mergers of black holes.

The orbiting X-ray observatory, renamed Huiyan, or Insight, following Thursdays launch, is Chinas first space telescope and second space mission dedicated to astronomy after a Chinese particle physics probe was sent into orbit in 2015 to search for evidence of dark matter.

Before its launch, we could only use second-hand observation data from foreign satellites, said Xiong Shaolin, a scientist at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was very hard for Chinese astronomers to make important findings without our own instruments.

The only way to make original achievements is to construct our own observation instruments, Xiong said in a report by Chinas state-run Xinhua news agency.Now Chinese scientists have created this space telescope with its many unique advantages, and its quite possible we will discover new, strange and unexpected phenomena in universe.

The X-ray telescope launched at 0300 GMT Thursday (11 p.m. EDT Wednesday) aboard a Long March 4B rocket from the Jiuquan space center in northwestern Chinas Gobi Desert. Liftoff occurred at 11 a.m. Thursday Beijing time.

The Long March 4B booster, powered by three hydrazine-fueled stages, delivered the Huiyan telescope into a 335-mile-high (540-kilometer) orbit tilted 43 degrees to the equator, according to tracking data released by the U.S. military. That is very close to the X-ray telescopes intended operating orbit.

Ground controllers plan to activate and test the observatory over the next five months before entering service late this year, fulfilling a mission first proposed by Chinese scientists in 1994 and formally approved by the Chinese government in 2011, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The 5,500-pound (2,500-kilogram) Huiyan spacecraft is designed for a four-year mission. Its three X-ray instruments, sorted to observe low, medium and high-energy X-rays, are sensitive to 1,000 to 250,000 electron volts, an energy range that encompasses the energy of a medical X-ray.

Earths atmosphere absorbs X-ray light signals, so astronomers must build and launch satellites for the job. X-ray observatories are uniquely suited for studies of black holes and neutron stars, two of the densest types of objects in the universe created in the aftermath of supernovas, the explosions at the end of a stars life.

Unlike X-ray telescopes launched by NASA and the European Space Agency, Chinas Huiyan mission does not use grazing mirrors, which must be extremely flat to reflect high-frequency X-ray waves. Chinese officials said they do not have the expertise to build such flat mirrors, so scientists came up with a backup plan that does not rely on traditional imaging.

The observing method, called demodulation, can help reconstruct the image of X-ray sources by using data from relatively simple non-imaging detectors, such as a telescope with collimators that collects and records X-ray photons parallel to a specified direction, Xinhua reported.

Scientists said the Chinese X-ray telescope will be able to observe brighter targets than other X-ray missions because the demodulation method diffuses X-ray light. Other telescopes reflect and focus X-ray photons onto detectors.

No matter how bright the sources are, our telescope wont be blinded, said Chen Yong, chief designer of Huiyans low-energy X-ray instrument, in an interview with Xinhua.

We are looking forward to discovering new activities of black holes and studying the state of neutron stars under extreme gravity and density conditions, and physical laws under extreme magnetic fields, said Zhang Shuangnan, the X-ray missions lead scientist. These studies are expected to bring new breakthroughs in physics.

Another set of detectors on the Huiyan telescope, originally added to shield against background noise, can be adjusted to make the observatory sensitive to even higher-energy gamma rays, according to the Xinhua news agency.

The detection of gravitational waves by ground-based sensors in Washington and Louisiana opened a new door in astronomy. Created by distant collisions and explosions, gravitational waves are ripples through the fabric of spacetime, and astronomers now seek to connect the phenomena with events seen by conventional telescopes.

Since gravitational waves were detected, the study of gamma-ray bursts has become more important, Zhang said in Xinhuas report on the mission. In astrophysics research, its insufficient to study just the gravitational wave signals. We need to use the corresponding electromagnetic signals, which are more familiar to astronomers, to facilitate the research on gravitational waves.

The launch of the Huiyan space telescope comes as NASA scientists turn on and calibrate another X-ray instrument recently delivered to the International Space Station.

After its launch June 3 on a SpaceX supply ship heading to the space station, NASAs Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer will spend the next 18 months studying the structure and behavior of neutron stars.

Three other satellites joined Chinas Huiyan spacecraft on Thursdays launch.

The OVS 1A and 1B satellites are the first two members of a commercial constellation of Earth-imaging craft for Zhuhai Orbita Control Engineering Co. Ltd. based in southern Chinas Guangdong province. The two 121-pound (55-kilogram) satellites will record high-resolution video from orbit, and future spacecraft in the Zhuhai 1 fleet will collect hyperspectral and radar imagery.

TheuSat 3 microsatellite owned by Satellogic, an Argentine company, was also aboard the Long March 4B rocket Thursday.

Built in Montevideo, Uruguay, by a Satellogic subsidiary company,uSat 3 weighs around 80 pounds (37 kilograms) and is identical to twouSat satellites launched on a Chinese rocket in May 2016.

Each uSat craft hosts cameras to capture imagery in color, infrared and in the hyperspectral regime, which gives analysts additional information about the makeup of objects, plants and terrain in Earth observation products. The satellites can resolve features on Earth as small as 3.3 feet (1 meter) across.

uSat 3 is nicknamed Milanesat, after the traditional Argentine steak dish Milanesa. The first twouSat satellites launched last year were named after Argentine desserts.

Satellogic is one of several privately-funded companies launching sharp-eyed commercial Earth-viewing satellites to collect daily images of the entire planet. The company says its satellite constellation, which could eventually number from 25 to several hundred spacecraft, will help urban planners, emergency responders, crop managers, and scientists tracking the effects of climate change.

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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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Chinese astronomy satellite placed into orbit by Long March rocket - Spaceflight Now

The monthly meeting of the Prairie Astronomy Club is 7:30 p.m. Tuesday (June 27) at Hyde Memorial Observatory on the south side of Holmes Park. The club will have a special solar observing event that same evening starting at 6 p.m.

Club members will have special solar telescopes set up to safely look at the sun. The public is encouraged to come and observe the sun through these telescopes. The Total Solar Eclipse on Aug. 21 is considered a once-in-a-lifetime event. Youll want to be as prepared as possible to enjoy this occurrence.

Come to the Prairie Astronomy Clubs monthly meeting June 27 and let us assist you in being as prepared as possible, says club spokesman Jim Kvasnicka.

The Prairie Astronomy Club will answer any questions you have regarding the upcoming Total Solar Eclipse which will occur Aug. 21 at the clubs monthly meeting in June.

Topics to be discussed are likely to include:

- When will the eclipse begin?

- How long will it last?

- What will I see?

- What do I need to safely look at the sun?

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Prairie Astronomy Club will have solar telescopes set up - Lincoln Journal Star

June 15, 2017 An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the north-west. This artistic impression shows the universe around the star formation area with, as an overlay, the scientists' observations. Credit: Veronica Allen/Alexandra Elconin

An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the north-west. The astronomers suspect that multiple stars-to-be share the same star formation disk, but the precise process is still a puzzle. The article with their findings has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

An international team of astronomers studied the star forming region G35.20-0.74N, more than 7000 light years from Earth in the southern sky. The astronomers used the (sub)millimeter telescope ALMA that is based on the Chilean Chajnantor plateau. ALMA can map molecular gas clouds in which stars form.

The researchers saw something special in the disk around a young, heavy star. While large amounts of oxygen-containing and sulfur-containing hydrocarbons were present throughout the disk, the astronomers found only nitrogen-containing molecules in the southeastern part of the disk. In addition, it was 150 degrees warmer on the nitrogen side than on the other side of the disk.

Based on these observations, the scientists suspect that there are multiple stars forming at the same time in one disk and that some stars are hotter or heavier than others. The researchers expect the disk to eventually break into several smaller disks as the stars grow.

A few years ago, there have been observed chemical differences in a star forming region in Orion. First author Veronica Allen (University of Groningen and SRON): "The area in Orion is five times bigger than our area. We have probably been lucky because we expect that such a chemical difference to be short-lived."

Second author Floris van der Tak (University of Groningen and SRON): "Many of the nitrogen molecules are poisonous cyanides. We do not know much about them because it is dangerous to work with those molecules in laboratories on earth."

The astronomers are now investigating the star formation cloud in more detail. Allen: "Maybe we can see the disk break into smaller disks in real time." In addition, the astronomers make models to see how differences in age, mass, temperature or gas density can cause a difference in chemical composition, too.

Explore further: First radio detection of lonely planet disk shows similarities between stars and planet-like objects

More information: V. Allen et al. Chemical segregation in hot cores with disk candidates. An investigation with ALMA, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2017). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201629118

First radio observations of the lonely, planet-like object OTS44 reveal a dusty protoplanetary disk that is very similar to disks around young stars. This is unexpected, given that models of star and planet formation predict ...

Stars form from gas and dust floating in interstellar space. But, astronomers do not yet fully understand how it is possible to form the massive stars seen in space. One key issue is gas rotation. The parent cloud rotates ...

For the first time, astronomers have been able to peer into the heart of planet formation, recording the temperature and amount of gas present in the regions most prolific for making planets.

Observations led by astronomers at the University of Leeds have shown for the first time that a massive star, 25 times the mass of the Sun, is forming in a similar way to low-mass stars.

For the first time, astronomers have seen a dusty disk of material around a young star fragmenting into a multiple-star system. Scientists had suspected such a process, caused by gravitational instability, was at work, but ...

(Phys.org)A team of researchers from the U.S. and Taiwan has captured the first clear image of a young star surrounded by an accretion disk. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes ...

An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the ...

Astronomers have released an image of a vast filament of star-forming gas, 1200 light-years away, in the stellar nursery of the Orion Nebula.

China successfully launched on Thursday its first X-ray space telescope to study black holes, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts, state media reported.

For decades, scientists thought that the magnetic field lines coursing around newly forming stars were both powerful and unyielding, working like jail bars to corral star-forming material. More recently, astronomers have ...

A small international team of researchers has found that water waves created due to scattering from a spinning vortex can show rotational superradiancean effect astrophysicists have predicted likely to occur in black holes, ...

Researchers at the University of Texas San Antonio using observations from NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, found that the dust surrounding active, ravenous black holes is much more compact ...

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Astronomers see mysterious nitrogen area in a butterfly-shaped star formation disk - Phys.Org

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FILE With an impending deep solar eclipse overshadowing their efforts, the Clark Planetarium hosted a gala to foster excitement for astronomy education.

SALT LAKE CITY With an impending deep solar eclipse overshadowing their efforts, the Clark Planetarium hosted a gala Thursday to foster excitement for astronomy education.

In anticipation a solar eclipse that will be viewable across much of the United States on Aug. 21, the Clark Planetarium has renewed its efforts to offer education resources and draw excitement to its programs for students with the help of former NASA scientist Phil Plait.

"Total eclipses are rare, and we haven't had one in the United States for quite some time," said Tom Beckett, an organizer of the planetarium gala. "This is a great opportunity to use an astronomical event to get people interested in astronomy."

Though Salt Lake City will not see the totality of the eclipse only a 91 percent partial coverage people may see the complete event from as close as Driggs, Idaho.

The planetarium's gala is a fundraiser to create astronomy education resources.

Plait returned to the planetarium for his third speaking appearance. Known as the "Bad Astronomer," he offered a keynote speech to explain the mechanics behind the eclipse and dispel some of the misunderstandings about eclipses.

"There are a lot of eclipse myths like, if you look at it, you'll go blind," Plait said.

Plait, who began public speaking while he was working for on the Hubble telescopes, said he sees his speaking engagements as something of a stand-up routine for science. He refers to himself as a science communicator and earned the title of the "Bad Astronomer" through his efforts at dispelling scientific misconceptions and creating humor around the concepts.

The risk associated with viewing an eclipse, he explained, comes after the roughly two-minute period of totality where the moon passes in front of the sun. That period of time allows the pupil of the eye to dilate, adjusting to the shadow cast by the moon, and the risk of injury follows as the moon continues forward, suddenly exposing the brightness of the sun once again.

Plait noted that despite this effect, he has yet to encounter a documented case of anyone becoming totally blinded by a passing eclipse.

"You can lose a little bit of your vision forever, or all of it for a short time, but your eye can heal," he said.

Beckett said there will be educators and telescopes available at the planetarium and throughout Salt Lake County during the eclipse to accommodate viewers who are not able to drive to Idaho to see the full eclipse.

Beckett also said the planetarium will have a viewing party as the Earth comes into alignment with Saturn and the sun, creating the best chance for people to see the rings of Saturn for another 17 years.

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Planetarium sees solar eclipse as opportunity to raise interest in astronomy - Deseret News

A cloud of gas and young stars in the Perseus molecular cloud may be revealing a strange truth to the universe: most, if not all, stars are born in pairs. This means that somewhere out there, the Sun has a lost companion and it may be one of several known stars. Essentially, all stars form in molecular clouds. In the Perseus observations, nearly all of these stars were gravitationally bound. This may be a requirement of protostars the egg-like objects could require a common center of gravity with a companion to accumulate mass. The dense cores then use leftover material to form more stars, continuing the process. So why doesnt the Sun have a binary companion (well, depending on who you ask)? It seems that 60 percent of stars shed their binary sister over time, gaining a wider distance from their partner until they are gravitationally severed. They also may not all have the same symmetry with regard to mass, meaning that some former companions could be brown dwarfs cast out by larger stars. The authors of the paper, accepted in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, say more work is needed to confirm their hypothesis. But if its true, the hunt may be on for the companion the Sun once had.

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Stars may all be born in pairs and lose their siblings later - Astronomy Magazine

NEW YORK Smithsonian astrophysicist Martin Elvis would like to see astronomers take on a crucial role for future asteroid mining: as astronomical prospectors scoping out the next big catch.

Elvis, a researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, discussed his dream for applied astronomy June 4 here at the Dawn of Private Space Science Symposium. Efficientasteroidmining would jump-start a space economy and bring down costs for exploration and space science, guiding humans into a modern space age, he said.

"My basic goal is just to revolutionize our exploration of the solar system, of the universe," Elvis said at the conference. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)]

Right now, he said, spaceflight and space science is unsustainably expensive. But asteroid mining could play a critical role in making those endeavors doable on a smaller budget, as private companies likeSpaceXhave decreased the launch cost per pound of payload.

But asteroid mining will face a critical problem, Elvis said: How to choose which asteroids will be worth the trip. And astronomers can play a crucial role in that determination, he said.

"The problem with asteroids is not many of them are valuable. You've got to find the right ones," he said. "We want to throw away that gray, stony stuff and deal with the carbonaceous or metallic ones, depending on whether you're looking for water or precious metals like platinum and palladium. So, this is where we [astronomers] come in."

As an example, Elvis pointed to the twin Magellan 6.5-meter telescopes in Chile. Professional astronomers could use telescopes of that size to characterize a faint asteroid in about 1-2 minutes. Eighty-five percent of asteroids could be thrown out based just on their color, he said, and the remaining 15 percent would be good prospects for sending small, exploratory probes using the data gathered about the objects' orbits and sizes.

Even a few nights per year would allow for the characterization of about 300 such objects, he said. And as larger telescopes come online, like the European Extremely Large Telescope and theGiant Magellan Telescope, the midsize telescopes could become more accessible for even more space-mining projects, he said.

"This means astronomers can turn out to be useful again [like] what [they] used to be, back in the days of navigation," he said. Similar to modern-day mining on Earth, there could be a multistep process of prospecting remotely "you don't just go straight to start digging rocks" before making a trip, Elvis added.

Such a process could cut asteroid prospecting costs by a factor of 10, he said. That would allow asteroid mining to flourish, lowering the cost commercially to put people and science in space.

On Earth, most of the precious metals, like platinum and palladium, are located 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) down, but they can come much nearer to the surface on asteroids. Those metals have dissolved in iron and were drawn to the center of the Earth, Elvis said, and the same thing happened on asteroids but the asteroids were then smashed up enough that it made the precious metals much more accessible. (Cometsalso contain valuable resources, especially water, Elvis said, but the energy needed to reach those fast-moving bodies makes them less worth the cost to explore.)

So far, Elvis has talked to the asteroid-mining companiesPlanetary ResourcesandDeep Space Industries, but neither company initially believed that this kind of remote prospecting would be necessary, he said.

"Both of them are dominated by engineers who are very good at building small spacecraft, and I'm sure they will succeed at building interplanetary cubesat-scale spacecraft for prospecting at the asteroid, but they were initially unbelieving of what I just told you," Elvis said.

They might come around, though, he added. "One of the companies did eventually realize that this was a necessary precursor to their sending out satellites," he said. "The other still isn't interested."

Original article onSpace.com.

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Using Astronomy to Prospect for Asteroids Could Help Us Mine the ... - Seeker